


Philosophical Optimalism

by celluloid



Category: Ant-Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Character Analysis, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Healing, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-15 23:41:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18679666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celluloid/pseuds/celluloid
Summary: Philosophical optimalism: that this universe exists because it's better than the alternatives.And if it isn't, well, then Scott Lang is going to try to make it that way.





	1. Before

**Author's Note:**

> In which I'm still trying to figure out when Scott became one of my favourite characters, but I'm just rolling with it.

“You were just… gone.”

_The longest five hours of my life,_ Scott thinks.

“Everyone was just gone.”

_The memorials_ , his mind helpfully supplies as he nods absently, hands curling around the mug of hot chocolate. Not coffee - Cassie isn’t old enough for—

Oh. Right.

But still, Cassie sits perpendicular to him at the kitchen table, her own mug getting cold in front of her. She hasn’t touched it, she’s just been staring at him. Scott finds it odd to look at his daughter - it’s Cassie, but it’s…

“I’m sorry,” he blurts out, embracing the warmth on his palms because at least that’s something normal. That’s something he remembers. When he was on house arrest sometimes he would set Cassie and himself up with hot chocolate to complement the make-your-own-sundae bar he’d get Luis to shop for. Sweet and scary nights: introduce his little girl to the horror genre, at her request, while also getting themselves so hyped up on sugar they wouldn’t be able to fall asleep, and then they’d stay up all night discussing all the ways the movie could have been even scarier (or how it could have involved more ants). They were rare - Maggie had a very strong case to make about the costs of dental - but they happened just often enough to be a favourite.

And they’d go through so much hot chocolate on those nights. So much. Their poor bladders.

He stares into his mug. Takes a drink.

“Why?” Cassie asks, the blankness in her voice replaced by genuine confusion. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“No, but I—“ he looks up at her, “I missed so much of your life. I keep missing your life. Three years in prison. Five years in the quantum realm.” Half of her life. “I’m— Peanut, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay, Dad,” she says. “I don’t blame you. I couldn’t. It’s not your fault.”

_Prison was your fault_ , his brain supplies helpfully. Scott takes another drink. _You abandoned your little girl because you got petty and stupid._

“Dad,” Cassie says, and Scott realizes he has no idea how long he just went completely quiet for. He was only gone for five hours. He needs to snap out of it. “Are you okay?”

He remembers finding the memorial and frantically racing around the stones, trying to find the L’s. Lang. Lang. Lang. Who knew how many Langs there were in San Francisco? Did other cities have memorials like this? Could they even get a proper tally? The sheer terror of running around, not even knowing, oh dear god let his little girl be okay— He’d gone to the quantum realm for her, he was ready to be stuck there forever for her— He’d gone back to the quantum realm, he was going to be stuck there forever again— If Cassie’s name was on that stone—

“Did you know my name was on the memorial?” he asks, meeting her eyes. He hopes he doesn’t look crazed. It’s one thing to appear crazed to a hapless security guard suddenly confronted with someone coming back from the dead in a ratty van, but in front of his own little— not so little— girl…

Cassie blinks. “Yeah,” she says, slowly. “I went with Mom to report you among the… gone.” With shaking hands, she finally reaches out to grip her own mug, brings it up to her lips. “But you’re back,” she says. “You’re really back.”

“I never left,” Scott insists. He was gone for five hours. _Five hours._ How could everything have gone to shit in five hours?

“Nobody else has ever come back. Nobody. If they had it would be on the news.”

“But I never left,” Scott says again. “I know it seems that way, Peanut, and I can’t apologize for missing— god, five years— but I wasn’t— What happened to all of those other people, it didn’t happen to me. I was just trapped in the quan…tum…” his voice trails off as his stomach drops again, like it had when he’d first been looking for Cassie’s name.

He’d never looked for Hope’s. Or Hank’s. Or Janet’s. Common sense tells him their names are all on the memorial. 

Or maybe not; Hope and Hank were on the run and maybe nobody confirmed to anyone official that Janet was actually back after— god, thirty years— But she’d visibly aged and he—

But if any one of them had been left, they would have brought him back. They would have.

“Dad?” Cassie asks, her voice small.

Scott shakes his head. _Snap out of it, idiot,_ he growls at himself. _It’s your daughter. Be there for her. Be the adult. Get it together._

Five years.

“Hope is gone, isn’t she?” he asks. He already knows the answer.

Cassie hesitates. “I thought so,” she says. “She never came back around. But then… you came back, so…”

Scott shakes his head. “It’s just me,” he says.

Then it hits him.

“It’s just me,” he says again.

Five years have passed, billions of people are gone, his daughter has spent half of her life growing up without him and there’s nothing he can do to make it right. It isn’t just him that’s screwed up - but he also didn’t have to drive his former boss’ car into a pool. He didn’t have to steal a weird motorcycle suit that he could use to shrink and grow at will. He didn’t have to volunteer to go back to the quantum realm. He should have stayed out of it all, just be a normal father, keep his head down, have a well-paying job, go to all of his little girl’s soccer games and physically take her to her first R-rated movie and…

“I think I need a nap,” he finally says. 

Cassie is immediately on her feet, mug abandoned. “Yeah,” she says, taking his arm to gently pull him up from the chair when he fails to actually move further, “you do. Come on, my bed’s actually made. You need it more than I do right now.”

* * *

Almost immediately, Scott sees the colours of the quantum realm swirling around him. For five hours they come and go, everything he already knew to be possible but had never meaningfully experienced, having been able to get the hell out of there relatively quick the first time.

The first time. He should have never been back.

_Don’t get sucked into a time vortex._

The disembodied voice rings around him. He swats away at it, as if he can brush sound waves away in the quantum realm. It’s a nuisance and it’s distracting him from holding on to the healing particles. That’s all he’s there for. To help Ava.

_Don’t get sucked into a time vortex._

Scott shakes his head. He had been the only logical choice, really; Janet had been down there long enough, Hank was still shaken from nearly losing his mind, and he never, ever wanted to subject Hope to that. Maybe one day they could go to the quantum realm together, but for now, it was too dangerous.

_Don’t get sucked into a time vortex._

Scott huffs. They really shouldn’t have been messing around; they all knew it was too dangerous. 

_Don’t get sucked into a time vortex._

And yet all four of them knew they had no choice in the matter; one of them had to go back. For the greater good. To save someone else’s little girl.

_We won’t be able to save you._

If it had been Cassie afflicted with that… He’d already been to the quantum realm to save his kid, who was he to deny that to someone else’s? Even if she was, like, actually an adult. Not a little girl anymore. But someone’s, at some point.

_We won’t be able to save you._

Had they been able to save Ava, or had it not mattered, like it hadn’t for so many others?

_And don’t get sucked into a time vortex. We won’t be able to save you._

Scott’s eyes shoot open, wide awake in the way he’d been just before he’d found out Cassie was still alive. A blank white ceiling greets him, as does that weird, corporeal feeling he had when he was suddenly flung back out of the quantum realm. Five hours— five years— and everything around him was solid and there was gravity in place and he actually knew what laws of physics were affecting him.

Everything around him is solid, he understands the world at this scale, but he also has the vaguest of familiarities with the laws of quantum physics.

_Nobody else has ever come back._

And he also knows something nobody else does.

_Get sucked into a time vortex. We’ll be able to save you._


	2. After

“Huh,” Scott says, unprompted.

“Hmm?” Hope asks, not bothering to turn her gaze from the stars above. The light pollution has been steadily getting worse, which is a good sign, but they’ve still found a spot of grass to just lie in and stare up at the above. It’s still an urban centre, but it’ll still take time to groom it back into order, tackle the overgrown plants, make it look as though nothing ever happened.

A sense of unease washes over Scott at that, because even though he wasn’t around for it, something very much did happen. Even though all of those people were brought back, his name is still on a monument to the dead.

“It’s nothing, really,” Scott says, sneaking a glance out of his peripheral vision at Hope. “I just remembered what you said to me, however long ago - that if you’d came with me to Germany, I’d have never been caught.”

“And I was right,” Hope says, not missing a beat, though Scott can see the smile on her face.

“Yeah,” he says, his own smile forming at the thought. He blinks, and it’s gone. “Because we won.”

Beside him, Hope stills. They’re wearing their suits. They don’t need to be. “What?” she asks.

Scott sits up suddenly. “Think about it,” he says, gesturing through the empty space before him. He wonders how many worlds his arms just passed through, unknowing of the disruption their atoms would have experienced if they operated by the same laws of physics. His mind’s been going back there a lot lately. “I fought Cross on my own,” he checks off with a finger, “and was almost stuck in the quantum realm forever.”

“You got back, though,” Hope says, moving a bit more slowly to sit back up. “And you helped me find my mom.”

Scott blinks, then smiles at her. “And I’m really happy I could do that,” he says. He looks away again, brings up another finger to check off. “Germany,” he says. Hope frowns.

Another finger. “We split up retrieving the lab and I almost drowned.”

“But you didn’t,” Hope says.

Scott exhales through his nose, a soft laugh stuck behind his lips. “Yeah, because you saved me.”

Hope shrugs. “It’s like I said, you’re better off if I’m there.” She pauses, amends. “You saved me too, though. Getting me out of the way of the tunnel when my parents came back.”

“You taught me how to fight,” Scott points out.

Hope is grinning. “You busted me out of jail.”

Scott beams back at her. “Well, we all have our specialities.”

They sit there for a moment, taking each other in, until Scott ruins it. “I went into the quantum realm alone,” he says, trailing off.

“And then I was gone,” Hope says, her own face falling. In the midst of the chaos on the battlefield, even now, on the other side of the country, well removed from its final moments, still wearing their suits even with no need, there hasn’t been time to digest any of it.

“Bad things happen when we’re split up,” Scott says softly. He looks back up at the stars they can see: entire worlds away (and he knows that for a fact now, even if he himself didn’t go to space), nothing more than specks. He looks ahead of him, at the empty air. Even more of them, probably. He doesn’t know. It was somehow only five hours, and he studied electrical engineering, not quantum physics. 

He should really talk to Janet - she’s the only other person who could possibly comprehend.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Hope breaks the silence, as if she’s reading his thoughts.

That snaps Scott out of it. _Maybe she can,_ he thinks.

“I think,” he starts, slowly, the words feeling heavy on his tongue, like he both should and shouldn’t be saying them, “I want to do something about it.”

Hope raises an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

Panic seizes Scott for a moment, kind of like when he lost contact with Hope days— years— ago. He’s overstepped. He’s overstepped and ruined a good thing all over again. “I mean,” he starts. Stops.

Hope just laughs, and it fuels him. “I know we’d have Cassie’s blessing, and really, that’s all I need,” he says.

Hope leans over, reaching out to bring her hand to the side of his face. Scott’s eyes are on hers instantly. “Not that we need his,” she says, “but you’re the closest anyone’s probably ever going to come to understanding my family, so I think my dad has to be on board by default.”

Scott blinks. “Thanks, I think,” he says.

Hope leans in to kiss him. “You’re welcome.”

* * *

It’s selfish - the world is just getting back on its feet and they’re of a small number of people that can actually help on a mass scale, Scott is one of the few people out there who knows everything that happened - but time is a fickle thing, as they’re all too aware of, and it’s not as though they require too many resources. They can do it all themselves.

They have the micro ceremony first, venturing out to a field of wildflowers on a sunny day. Scott stands under a cluster of orange California poppies, sheltering him slightly from the warmth of the sun’s rays. He closes his eyes and tilts his face upwards, daydreaming, marvelling that this is happening at all. Not that he wouldn’t have expected it some day - probably - but just, after convincing the smartest people left in the world to go time travelling, after being an active participant in a battle of such a scale…

He comes back to himself, because the day is picture perfect, the birds are chirping and not trying to eat them, and everything is beautiful down here.

The idea had popped into Scott’s head - “why don’t we use ants as ring bearers?” - and before anyone could actually tell him their thoughts on it, Hank had smiled. It was just for a second, but they’d all seen it, and that had settled things then and there.

Getting out of prison, Scott had never thought he’d actually find anyone after Maggie, let alone… this. All of this. Any of this.

He looks forward and grins when he sees Hope, flanked by both her parents, parting the tall grass to reach him. A crazy ant has her ring, a carpenter ant his, and Scott’s more than fine with his new life.

The macro ceremony is after, a casual affair with a few more people. They’d mulled over who to invite - namely, if any Avengers should be extended an invitation, since their group was otherwise small and mostly intimate enough. Scott had nixed it, though; it felt wrong. He’d gone back in time with Captain America and Iron Man and both were… Some were in space and oh, wow, their numbers on Earth are smaller now, he and Hope have suddenly risen in prominence, that doesn’t feel right—

Sam Wilson had been the only guy he’d seriously considered - the first he’d ever met, who had brought him into the fold to begin with - but he’d quietly nixed that, too. He was probably busy. He didn’t need anyone bothering him.

Sitting back, away from the festivities, Scott thinks he made the right call. He takes in this new family he’s assembled - laughs as Ava freaks Kurt out just by standing behind him and tapping him on the shoulder; hopeful for the future as Luis and Paxton eagerly talk shop; smiles as he catches Bill explaining some scientific principle or another to Cassie; heart soaring as he sees Hope and Hank curled up together in a quiet moment away from everyone else, like him - and thinks, this was the best thing that could have happened not just for him, but for everyone.

“You’re quiet,” Janet says, taking a seat next to him atop the picnic table he’d perched on.

Scott blinks, turning to face her. “Oh, hey, uh—“ his brain stops, not actually sure what he should call her now that they’re officially family.

She just smiles at him, warm, and everything continues to feel right. “You can still just call me Janet,” she says.

“How’d you know I was thinking that?” Scott asks. “Is that a side effect of quantum entanglement, or…”

Janet shakes her head. “No,” she says, “you’re kind of an open book.” Scott nods absentmindedly at that. “Not that that’s a bad thing. I like it. I could only hope to welcome someone so warm-hearted and genuine into my family.”

Scott turns to stare forward. He opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. “Did you think that far into the future?” he asks. “When you were trapped, I mean. About… about things you couldn’t possibly have known about. Not just if your daughter was growing up okay, but what school she’d get into, what kind of job she’d have, who she’d meet. Did you think about those kinds of things?” He can’t look at her. He’s not sure why. He looks out at Hope and her dad instead.

Janet follows his gaze. “I think you know the answer to that,” she says, softly. “What did you think about when you were down there?”

“The first time?” Scott nods. “The second time… I don’t really remember. It was just panic, I guess.”

Janet places a hand on his back, her fingertips stretched out, dancing little patterns he can feel, like ghosts. In the back of his mind, he wonders if she’s doing something similar to what she did when she first helped Ava. He wonders if he needs it, if his body needs it, now. It’s not like he was there for long, but… longer than most.

“That makes sense,” Janet says, breaking off Scott’s train of thought. He closes his eyes. “It was just for a moment, but I was prepared when I went in. The first time you did you were, too. The second time must have been difficult.”

Scott makes an aborted move to shrug. “It was only five hours.”

“Five hours is still a long time,” Janet says. “Especially when it’s so uncertain. You haven’t talked about this with anyone, have you?”

“No,” Scott says. “There hasn’t really been an opportunity. Once I learned what happened it was just go, go, go. And then we fought. And then I just… Cassie needed her dad, and I didn’t want to be without Hope, and then proposing and getting everything ready for today, and it’s just been everything all at once.”

Janet nods beside him. There are little clockwise circles and they’re grounding him, whatever they are. “Hope told me something like that,” she says. “When you guys first started planning. She said you seemed— Well, I don’t want to use the word ‘antsy,’ but…”

Scott’s head dips forward, and he huffs a little laugh. “That’s as good a word as any.”

Janet joins him. “I suppose it is.” She falls silent for a moment, and Scott opens his eyes to see her still looking out at her daughter and husband. The sun is still high in the sky, its rays warming everything; they’re in an open area of park, not sheltered by the shade, absorbing it all. “They’re close, aren’t they?”

“Yeah,” Scott says, because for as long as he’s known either of them, they’ve been completely inseparable. He only came into the fold because Hank wouldn’t allow anything to happen to his daughter; that he ended up not being a complete disaster was just a stroke of good fortune. “I think she just wanted to hold on to everything she had left. And so did he.”

Janet’s hand is still on his back, but it’s stopped moving. They’re both quiet for a moment, before she breaks the silence. “I still feel guilty too, you know,” she says.

Scott instantly knows what she’s talking about. “But it’s not like you made the choice to leave them—“

“And you didn’t choose to leave your daughter,” Janet says. Scott looks at her and she smiles sadly. “It’s harder to accept when it’s you, though, isn’t it?”

Scott bites his lower lip, gaze switching over to Cassie, who at some point moved on to an intense, but friendly, discussion about something he can’t hear with Ava. “Yeah,” he says. That urge to apologize to her still hasn’t gone away, even though he’s tried it multiple times and she’s rejected it each time, insisting it wasn’t necessary. And even though he knows it isn’t necessary, there’s still something inside him telling him he has to do it, he owes her that for the rest of his life. “Do you think it ever goes away?”

“I’ll let you know if you promise to do the same thing for me,” Janet says. Scott thinks he can agree with that.

* * *

“I saw you talking with my mom,” Hope says. It’s dark, just the two of them, officially moved in together and slumped out across the couch in hoodies and sweats. Hope is leaning against the side; Scott’s head is partially in her lap, his legs splayed out over the rest of the couch. Both are exhausted. “What about?”

“I saw you with your dad,” Scott mumbles in counter, eyes just half open. “What was that about?”

“About how lucky I am,” Hope answers. “About how fortunate we are that things turned out this way. Now you answer my question.”

“Mm,” Scott says. “Unique therapy group, I think.”

Above him, Hope yawns, shifting to bring her legs up under her. Scott takes that as his cue, sitting up some, moving his head from her lap to her shoulder.

“I’m really glad,” Hope says, so quiet Scott can barely hear her, and it’s a final thought before both drift off.

* * *

“Imposter syndrome,” Cassie announces, shrugging her backpack onto the kitchen table and making a beeline to raid the fridge.

“Hey, dinner in an hour,” Scott throws over his shoulder as he’s cutting vegetables. Cassie rolls her eyes and grabs a string cheese. “And what, you taking psychology now? Do they even teach that at your school?”

“No,” Cassie says, sitting herself down and unwrapping her cheese. “We were talking about superheroes at lunch, though, and it came up.”

More often than not, Scott finds himself grateful he doesn’t venture outside that much. It’s not as though he wants to be holed up like he was when on house arrest - he appreciates the fresh air and especially the freedom - but even months later, it’s as though Tony Stark’s name casts a shadow over everything. How he helped save humanity, how the Avengers didn’t just avenge but actually repaired things.

He’s found himself a happy home running things from behind the scenes for Luis and the guys; even though Scott’s extroverted and charismatic in his own right he feels a little safer being more withdrawn, less forward-facing. It’s not as though the company needs anyone other than Luis to really make a sales pitch, anyway.

But even in those moments Scott is out in public - the park, the grocery store, the bank - and there’s a television playing in the background, or snippets of a conversation he overhears - it feels off. Tony Stark isn’t an abstract figure to him; Scott knew him. Fought him. Yelled at him. Worked with him. Gave him a heart attack on purpose. And nobody outside of his immediate circle knows, will ever know.

People don’t even know who he is; Ant-Man doesn’t register on anyone’s consciousness. Giant-Man might - really, it depends on what footage someone captured that makes it to air - but even then, it’s not as though he, Scott Lang, is going to reach celebrity status. He remembers back to when he could gasp _“It’s the Falcon”_ way back when; he’ll probably never have that going for him. He’s both upset about it and not at all.

“Yeah?” Scott asks, drifting back into reality. “How so?”

Cassie peels a huge string off. “Well, how do all of the smaller superheroes feel? I don’t mean literally smaller,” she says before he can so much as open his mouth, already knowing, “I mean how Thor’s like a god, but he still teamed up with a lot of others who aren’t as strong as him. So what’s that like for them?”

“Are you asking in the abstract, or are you asking specifically?”

Cassie shrugs. “Maybe a little of both.”

“Well,” Scott says, setting the knife down and finally turning around, “it’s weird, because they all chose it, right? Even take someone like War Machine, he made a conscious decision to have that suit of armour, and he was already working to fight for people well before he had that. So he always knew what he was getting into. And I’ve just kind of been a guy who happened to be around.”

“See, that’s what I mean,” Cassie says, pointing her cheese string at him. It flops over. “Imposter syndrome. You have it.”

“I think we can all agree I’m not as important as any of those guys.”

“No, but you are,” Cassie insists. “You came back. Nobody else did. Just you.”

Scott leans back against the counter. “I never left, though—“

“That’s the point,” Cassie says. “I still remember when people first started… going. And Mom couldn’t get ahold of you. She tried so hard to get ahold of you. And she couldn’t, and then they found Uncle Luis’ van, and…” She sniffs, rubbing at her eyes.

“Cassie,” Scott says, at a loss, because he couldn’t help her then and he can’t help her now.

“I didn’t know how I was supposed to say goodbye to you,” she says, composing herself enough to regain her voice properly. “So I guess I never did. And it sucked, and it sucked every single day. But each year just turned into another year without you there, and that just became life. We just accepted it. This is how life is now, and you just deal with it, and there’s nothing you can do about it, and that’s that.

“But then you showed up again. And you were so out of it, but I guess I was, too, trying to figure it out. So you went to bed, and when you woke up… Do you remember when you woke up?”

Scott thinks back on it, but everything’s a blur; so much had happened all at once in those first few days, he only remembers flashes. His memories from that time still jump from embracing Cassie again to the dread washing over him as he realized how much of her life he’d missed to dreams of the quantum realm. “No,” he shakes his head.

Cassie’s eyes stop watering as she meets his gaze head on. “You said, ‘I’m sorry, Peanut, but I have to go, now. I have to fix this,’ and you left. I tried to wrap my head around what you meant, but I didn’t get it until suddenly I heard birds outside for the first time in forever, and then I got it: we’d all adapted to our new lives, but you didn’t have the chance to, so you refused to accept it. And that’s why everyone came back: because of you, Dad. You decided the world as it was was bullshit so you did something about it.”

“That sounds about right to me,” Hope says from the kitchen entranceway. Scott sharply looks up at her while Cassie nods, satisfied with her backup.

“When did you get here?” is all Scott can think to ask.

“In time to hear about how you were doing when you were pulled from the quantum realm,” Hope says, leaning against the frame and taking him in. “That’s kind of how I’ve always known you - right from when we told you to abort your first mission at the Avengers Compound and you went in anyway because you knew you could do it.”

Scott’s hands fall at his sides. “I’m just a guy, though,” he says.

Hope shrugs. “We all are, really.”

“And nobody else in the universe thought to do what you did,” Cassie says.

Scott finds himself mentally drifting back to a home on the outskirts of society, sitting on the deck, doing everything he could to stop himself from yelling at the man who would soon after perfect time travel. How much Tony didn’t want to do it. And how much Scott was trying to convey that he wasn’t going to tolerate this new reality if there was something he could do about it, how badly he wished Hope had been there to explain things for him, how he might have to die trying on her behalf because he had just been talking to her and he might have been able to move on with just Cassie but he wasn’t going to let everyone else go.

And how his end result got another little girl’s father taken away from her, permanently.

“I guess so,” Scott says, and his smile doesn’t reach his eyes.

* * *

“So my daughter and my wife have it in their heads that I’m important,” Scott says.

Janet doesn’t even look up from the vase she’s painting. “I should hope so,” she says.

Scott shakes his head, choosing a colour to dip his own brush in. Yellow. Ever since he and Janet decided to start talking regularly they’ve tried to mix things up; today it’s helping decorate both their houses. Scott finds that since his second time in the quantum realm he’s been much more inclined towards colours and brightening things up; the five hours still dance behind his eyelids sometimes. He needs the yellow to add more contrast. “I mean beyond that.”

“Beyond that how?” Janet asks. She’s a better painter than him, not that he’s surprised by that; while he’s trended towards the abstract to compensate, she’s trended more towards realism. It makes sense, Scott figures; he’s kind of trying to recapture something he barely experienced, while she’s putting herself back into the real world.

“That without me, the universe wouldn’t have gone back to the way it was.”

“That sounds about right to me,” Janet says. Scott nearly chokes.

“How?” he asks.

Janet sets her brush in water, swirling it around to get the paint off of it, wiping up at the sides of the container to clean the bristles, and looks at him. “I couldn’t have righted my universe without you,” she says. “And not just anyone would have dropped everything to help someone like that. There’s a reason my husband let you keep the suit; he knew he could count on you if he needed to. Not everyone is like that, but you are.”

Scott wants to protest, though he’s finding himself slowly running out of arguments as the women in his life keep shooting him down. That, and he’s trying to take Janet’s earlier sentiment to heart; how easy it is for him - for both of them, really - to beat up on themselves when they’d give anyone else a pass for the exact same behaviour. 

So he concedes. “What are you painting?” he asks, leaning over for a better look.

Janet smiles at him. “My daughter’s wedding day,” she says, and Scott recognizes it now; the towering orange flower petals looming up at the top of the vase. It’s going to look really good when they’re actually housing flowers of their own.

“That looks perfect,” he says.

“Thanks,” Janet replies, and she’s so warm. Everything about her is such a warm and accepting person. Scott wants to be just like her when he grows up. Janet leans over to take a look at his own work. “The quantum realm?” she asks, though she has to already know the answer.

Scott nods. “It’s like it’s stuck behind my eyelids. Every time I go to sleep…” he trails off, then goes for red, not bothering to clean his brush off.

Janet bites at her lower lip for the briefest of moments. “Me too,” she says. “And I don’t know how to feel about that. There’s so much left to explore, too much for a lifetime, but I’ve already missed so much up here.”

“But you want to know more,” Scott points out. “You’re a scientist; that’s why you got into any of this in the first place.”

“Exactly,” Janet sighs. “But now that we know it’s possible to go there and come back, it’s been in the back of mind, every day. I could go back, I _should_ go back, but my family, my life— I completely missed my daughter growing up.”

Scott nods even more vigorously. “Exactly,” he says. “Exactly. And what about when something goes wrong? You can’t plan for that.”

“And then you’re just gone.”

They let that hang over themselves for a minute. “I’m still trying to come to terms with that, I think,” Scott says.

“It would have been traumatic,” Janet replies, her brush moving again. “You had no idea what happened, and suddenly this supposedly safe procedure has taken you away from everyone you know and love.”

“Yeah,” Scott says. “And it’s been so long since I’ve had any real downtime - since my house arrest, really - I don’t know what to do with it. Save the universe, get married again, try to be a real dad who’s actually there for the first time in a decade, but everything in between I just keep coming back to something I don’t even understand.”

“How’s Cassie dealing with it?” Janet asks.

Scott clicks his tongue in thought. “She was always pretty upfront in encouraging me to be Ant-Man. She’s the last person I have to worry about, she’s great. I haven’t told her about any of the stuff I’m dealing with and I don’t think I’m going to. How’s Hope doing?” he speeds through his answer, jumping from thought to thought as fast as his mouth will let him.

Janet either doesn’t catch it or lets it slide. “About the same,” she says. “Though older, of course. Wiser. Hank did a great job raising her.”

“Wait,” Scott says, a fleeting thought he’s able to catch before it floats off, “she hasn’t talked to you about any quantum realm stuff?”

Janet shoots him a look. “No. Why?”

“You know she wants to go, right?”

So many emotions cross Janet’s face all at once Scott has a hard time identifying any of them. “Have you two been talking about it?”

“No,” Scott says, “but I can tell. She’s still your daughter. Having finally gotten the chance to meet you… you’re so alike. But all of the hangups you have about going back to the quantum realm? She doesn’t have those at all. I think she’s just staying quiet about it for my sake, though it’s killing her inside, since she’s the only one out of the four of us who hasn’t been.”

Janet hums. “Have you talked to her about that, specifically, at all?”

Scott shakes his head. “No, because then I’d do something stupid and impulsive like suggest we go together, and I don’t think I’m ready for that.”

“I don’t think she’d let you if she knew you weren’t ready, no matter what you actually said,” Janet says. “That’s just a feeling, though.”

“Huh,” is all Scott can think to say in response.

* * *

All the arrangements are set. Cassie is staying with Maggie and Paxton for the foreseeable future; with college application season coming up, she’s got more than enough to keep her occupied (although ever since meeting Bill, Berkeley seems to be her destination of choice well in advance, though Maggie is making sure she still applies to other places as well). X-Con Security Consultants is steady enough on its feet that they’ve been able to add to their roster of staff, days of bankruptcy looming over their heads long forgotten.

There’s been a substantial add to the power grid via Hank’s beach house, with not just a quantum tunnel and miniaturized version available, but two additional backups, as well. Hank and Janet both remain on standby, and really, what are the chances of there being another genocidal alien with cosmic powers lurking out there to disrupt their lives? Scott laughs it off (but not really, because he still remembers looking out the window from the Avengers Compound before it was completely blown up and his instinctively shrinking kept him alive).

But then, being trapped in the quantum realm helped the last time… so…

Scott thinks there’s just some guilt he’s not going to get over. Just hearing the name “Stark” remains upsetting, though he knows he didn’t make Tony do anything he didn’t want to. Seeing how much Cassie grew up still elicits a twinge of regret, though he’s so proud of the person she’s becoming. And just being able to sit there with Janet has alleviated a lot; not that it will ever go away, but that there’s someone else who completely understands everything he’s feeling, no matter how irrational it is, at least gives him that kind of security blanket. It won’t all get better, but in the moments he can’t move on, he still has somebody.

And for the rest of it, well, at some point, he has to move on. Or at the very least, confront what’s been holding him back.

He looks ahead into the tunnel, cocking his head at it.

Hope takes his hand. They both have a time GPS on, just in case, a last line of defence.

“Thank you,” she says, and he smiles at her. He’s still so lucky. “You ready?”

“Let’s find out,” Scott says.

Their helmets snap on. The worst may still come yet - but this? This won’t be it. He won't let it.


End file.
